Lisa Yuskavage: New Paintings

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Lisa Yuskavage. On view at 533 West 19th Street in New York, this will be the artist’s seventh solo show with the gallery.

In this exhibition, Lisa Yuskavage continues her long-standing exploration of what constitutes a model, exceptionally summoning the history of her own work as part of that process. Its two rooms are defined by contrasting moods that the artist has often intertwined within individual paintings, and which both engage with aspects of art making. The first includes a group of works that confront the viewer on varied levels, recalling the tension between seer and seen. Addressing issues of vulnerability, power, and rage, they reference an art-historical sub-tradition “in which rudeness fortifies erudition and corrosive humor strips humanism of all sentimentality,” exemplified by artists such as Francisco Goya and Philip Guston.¹Read more

^{¹ Quote provided by Yuskavage from Robert Storr, Guston (New York: Abbeville Press, 1983), p. 54.}

^{Images: Lisa Yuskavage, Night Classes at the Department of Painting Drawing and Sculpture, 2018–2020 (detail). Lisa Yuskavage, Yellow Studio, 2021 (detail). Lisa Yuskavage, Pink Studio (Rendezvous), 2021 (detail)}

Location

533 West 19th Street New York

Dates

September 9—October 23, 2021

Artist

Lisa Yuskavage

Press Release

New Paintings

Installation view, Lisa Yuskavage: New Paintings, David Zwirner, New York, 2021

“[Yuskavage’s] big studio paintings are as much color studies as narratives. Different shades of the dominant color define the crisp forms of furnishings and reiterate color samples taped to the wall. Study the backgrounds for themselves; they are, in different ways, breathtaking.”

—Roberta Smith, art critic

Lisa Yuskavage

Pink Studio (Rendezvous), 2021

Oil on linen

77 x 70 inches (195.6 x 177.8 cm)

Four new large-scale color-field compositions each depict an artist’s studio or art classroom. Combining a variety of processes, techniques, characters, and references, the works epitomize painting’s ability to compress time.

In these new works, Yuskavage mines her own image history, revisiting specific paintings from the past three decades by depicting them as works in progress within new narratives.

Lisa Yuskavage, Home, 2018 (detail)

Lisa Yuskavage, Dude of Sorrows, 2015 (detail)

Lisa Yuskavage, Big Blonde with Hairdo, 1994 (detail)

Lisa Yuskavage mixes paint in her Brooklyn studio, 2020. Photo by Jason Schmidt

“Yuskavage gives us a space where tactility reigns, both in the creaminess of her paint and the sumptuousness of her surfaces. The distinction between the skin of bodies and the skin of paint rides along a knife’s edge. Her universe is a continuation of the Rococo, a made-up world of adornment, flirtation, and play.”

—Helen Molesworth, in Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness, the catalogue for Yuskavage’s current solo exhibition on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art through September 19, 2021

Lisa Yuskavage

Yellow Studio, 2021

Oil on linen

70 x 77 inches (177.8 x 195.6 cm)

“Light for Yuskavage is alchemical. Like her great Venetian forebears, she finds in light the power to transform the visual image, to imbue it with mood.”

—Marcia B. Hall, art historian

Lisa Yuskavage, Yellow Studio, 2021 (detail)

Gustav Eberlein, Boy with Thorn, 1879/1886. Nationalgalerie der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin. Photo by Andres Kilger

The model’s pose in Yuskavage’s Yellow Studio recalls Boy with Thorn, a Hellenistic sculpture of a boy pulling a thorn from his foot that has been the subject of countless classical, Renaissance, and neoclassical reproductions.

Lisa Yuskavage in her Brooklyn studio, 2020. Photo by Jason Schmidt

“Ultimately, Lisa Yuskavage’s paintings are about the experience of the world we know through the prism of a studio known only to the artist. Hers are paintings of the mind that emerge as raw, public propositions from the most private of spaces.”

—Christopher Bedford, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art

Lisa Yuskavage

Night Classes at the Department of Painting Drawing and Sculpture, 2018-2020

Oil on linen

86 x 120 1/8 inches (218.4 x 305.1 cm)

An easel in Yuskavage’s Brooklyn studio features a photograph of Georges Braque and a study for Night Classes at the Department of Painting Drawing and Sculpture, 2020. Photo by Jason Schmidt

These works take their point of departure in Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio (1911) and The Pink Studio (1911), evoking the artist’s studio as a stand-in for the creative process.

Henri Matisse, The Red Studio, 1911. Installation view, Collection 1880s–1940s, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2019. Photo by Jonathan Muzikar

The new works notably revisit specific paintings from Yuskavage’s Bad Baby series of models in explicit poses from the 1990s.

One of Yuskavage’s earliest works, The Ones That Don’t Want To: Bad Baby (1992) is depicted on the back wall of Night Classes at the Department of Painting Drawing and Sculpture with its angry-looking model layered into a new, fictive whole.

Lisa Yuskavage, The Ones That Don’t Want To: Bad Baby, 1992

Lisa Yuskavage

Master Class, 2021

Oil on linen

84 x 72 inches (213.4 x 182.9 cm)

As is often the case for Yuskavage’s depiction of couples, the relationship between the male and female figure appears psychologically charged and open-ended, just as it remains unclear who is the master and who is the student.

Lisa Yuskavage, Helga, 1993 (detail)

The woman’s face resembles the figure in the artist’s 1993 painting Helga (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), reinforcing the imagined world that Yuskavage has constructed.

Lisa Yuskavage, Master Class, 2021 (detail)

Lisa Yuskavage

Scissor Sisters, 2020

Yellow Studio, 2021

Oil on linen

70 x 77 inches (177.8 x 195.6 cm)

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